ack - seemed to announce their
models of a home computer simultaneously. The question of "who was first?"
will never be solved. Commodore displayed the PET at the Consumer Electronics show in January 1977, Apple sold their first unit at the March West Coast Computer Faire. Radio Shack didn't enter the field with the TRS-80 until August, but they were able to sell units in quantity right away.

Here in Toronto, we first saw Commodore computers in quantity at the Canadian National Exhibition. One of the themes for that year was "chess". Commodore furnished dozens of PET computers, furnished with Peter Jenning's Microchess program, at a site in the Coliseum area; visitors were invited to sit down and play chess.

With little access to a dealer network, Commodore had a curious method of achieving sales. Buyers would send Commodore money - about $600 US - and Commodore expected that they would ship the PET within three months! A lot of PET deliveries in the area took place immediately after the CNE closed.

XII. COMMODORE DESIGN EXCELLENCE -

The Commodore PET was a remarkable machine in many ways, with features you did not find on its competitors of the time. Many might be considered ahead of their time. The PET, and all following 8-bit products, had "screen editing."

Instead of receiving information from the keyboard, the operating system transferred the received keystrokes to the computer screen. When a RETURN key was pressed, the system then read from the current line of the screen, and
tool the data from there. This made screen editing simple and truly WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get"), and later allowed some elegant programming tricks. this was far from intuitive back in the days when much computing was based on teleprinter input.

Associated with this was the concept of keyboard interrupt handling. Since
most keystrokes were collected into a buffer for subsequent delivery to the screen, the main system could ignore them and go on with whatever job it was doing, allowing an interrupt service to take care of this. The result was a "type-ahead" feature, not seen on other contemporary computers; for those, the keyboard was dead until a program specifically asked for input.

Computer input was thought of in those days as a teleprinter device or equivalent. As such, input and output was upper case only; a full ASCII capability was unheard of. Commodore added an upper/lower case facility to the PET. However, the fixation of upper case was such that lower case was "inverted" - that is, you had to shift to get lower case letters. The Radio Shack TRS-80 had no lower case; the Apple II had "slots" or board plug-in positions, where upper/lower case could be added at a later time.

The Commodore PET was introduced without peripherals such as a printer or floppy disk; it took almost a year for these devices to appear. But the interface was already in place, and it was an interesting one: The Hewlett-Packard GPIB ("General Purpose Interface Bus"), also known as the IEEE-488 bus. It was possible right from the start to connect to specialized devices, such as sensors, which had already been devised for this bus. When
the Commodore disk drive and printers appeared, they would string together off this bus. It was decades before the introduction of the USB ("Universal Serial Bus") would use a similar scheme.

The use of such a bus called for intelligent peripherals. When the Commodore devices finally appeared, they had their own microcontrollers and logic; in
the vase of disk drives, that included a sophisticated DOS, which wrote data
to disk in a more sophisticated way than other drives of that generation. Although "back end computers" were known in the mainframe environment, their use in the micro world was, to put it mildly, innovative. Meanwhile, competing machines of the era had to have DOS loaded into the main computer.

Commodore somehow hade a deal with Microsoft for a perpetual license for Microsoft Basic. I don't know of any other manufacturer who obtained a
license, and it gave Commodore a major competitive edge for the entire life of its right-bit products. Microsoft had not at the time achieved major sales,
and Bill Gates was complaining loudly and publicly about software piracy. Perhaps Tramiel and Peddle offered a deal that appeared attractive for the time. Microsoft later regretted the deal, and internal memos within Commodore urged employees to disclose no information about Basic, for fear of litigation.

In contrast, Apple initially had only "integer Basic" whose arithmetic was based on 16-bit integers. This gave speed, but limited the usage. The Radio Shack TRS-80 had "tiny Basic", as published in Doctor Dobbs Journal. Eventually, both of them migrated to Microsoft Basic; but royalty payments to Microsoft became a factor in their product pricing.

Even when the competition joined the Microsoft bandwagon, the Commodore
version still had an advantage. "Commodore Basic" as it was called, had a 32-bit mantissa, which computer techs will tell me produces about 10 decimal digits of numeric accuracy. Other versions had only a 24-bit mantissa, perhaps to enhance speed; but this will give an accuracy of only about 7 digits, which is not enough for financial work.

XIII. THE GROWTH OF PUBLICATIONS: NEWSLETTERS TO NEWSSTANDS -

A proliferation of magazines and newsletters came with the advance in microcomputer technology. Like Doctor Dobbs, BYTE magazine arrived early. Its first year contained articles such as how to build your own wire-wrap tool out of a ballpoint refill, and how to punch paper tape so that humans could hold
it up to the light and read actual text.

The Commodore world hosted many newsletters. "The PET Paper" was told by Commodore to remove the PET reference, which they viewed as a trademark; it became "The XXX Paper" a title which might raise some eyebrows in this day and age. Len Lindsay published "The PET Gazette." He became overwhelmed by the volume of material arriving, and public begged for someone to take over the
job on his behalf. Robert Lock of Greensboro, North Carolina, did this in autumn of 1979. COMPUTE magazine developed into a major publication; in the late 1960s, it became the largest selling microcomputer publication of them all. It ceased publication in the late 90s.

"The Transactor" began as a single sheet newsletter issued by Commodore
Canada. After a couple of issues, a young fellow called Karl Hildon was hired to keep it going as a customer information vehicle. Hildon built it into a respectable technical journal. When Commodore tired of it, Hildon found
another company in the Toronto area willing to continue publication. The Transactor folded in the late 90s, but was considered a major technical source during its lifetime.

XIV. THE TORONTO PET USERS GROUP (TPUG) -

Shortly after the arrival of the first few PET computers in Toronto, I
received a call from Lyman Duggan, who worked for Marconi. He wanted to know why nobody was organizing a user group; I gave him the usual answer. so sometime in 1979, about sixteen interested users gathered in the rec room of Lyman's apartment block, and TPUG - at that time, called Club 2001, after the PET 2001 - was born.

Duggan ran TPUG as a private enterprise. He arranged program and location, charged five dollars for attendance, and served coffee and doughnuts. His
wife, Cherie, has cassette tapes containing contributed programs which sold
for a dollar or two. Attendance grew rapidly, and Duggan had to seek out ever larger sites for the meetings. Then, with little warning, his employee posted him to Florida. Duggan quickly nominated a board of directors to replace him, and TPUG became a member's club.

The Toronto area had quite a few talented people who could be called upon to make presentations, offer opinions, or disseminate news. Apart from myself, we had Karl Hildon, editor of The Transactor; Brad Templeton, who later went on to
become the publisher of Clarion online service; Steve Punter, who wrote the first major word processor package for Commodore, and numerous others. And I have a special affection for the an

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